It all started with an innocent walk in the park when I got into conversation with a young woman whose cute little black Pomeranian, a friendly little chap, was running back and forth, in and out of the undergrowth, as confident as you like. At the park gates, I expected her to put him on a lead but, instead, he trotted to her car and jumped into the front passenger seat. How well-behaved, how obedient, I marvelled.

When I got home, I googled ‘Pomeranian’ and showed my husband a picture of a similar dog to the one I’d seen.

‘He’s sired four pups, and three of them are still for sale,’ I enthused, exaggerating my excitement so he’d be infected by it and come with me to see them.

‘We said we wouldn’t get any more dogs,’ he moaned. ‘They’re a tie. And they get sick.’

Thirty minutes later we were in the house where the mother and four female pups lived – the little black father lived elsewhere. The mother was bigger than her ‘husband’ but we were assured that this was usually the case in the world of Pomerania. The pups were all adorable balls of fluff: two black, one apricot and one the spitting image of her mother, reddish with a blonde undercarriage and a line of black along her back.

The mother dog’s behaviour was impeccable. After playing with her pups, she put her front legs on the sofa and fixed us with an intense gaze, as if sussing out whether we were suitable adoptive parents for one of her girls. Then all the pups toddled towards our feet and gently nibbled our shoelaces before falling asleep with their heads on our shoes. Entranced by this display, we decided then and there to reserve a pup.

Honey at 8 weeks when we brought her home.

We chose the firstborn, the one most like her mother, and called her Honey because of her colouring and because she was so sweet.

Now she’s six months old, a teenager in doggy terms, our dear little ball of fluff has morphed into a monster. The Kennel Club guide to ideal weight for females is 4.5–5.5 lbs. The American Kennel Club is a little more generous, allowing 3-7lbs. Our little girl weighed in today at 15.5 lbs!!!

Honey at 6 months, having dug up half the garden.

Add to that her penchant for digging holes in the garden and bounding into the house spreading the evidence, attacking chair legs, skirting boards: you name it, she’s tried to eat it – I can’t tell you how many splinters we’ve retrieved from her chops – is it any wonder we have days when we look at our boisterous adolescent, who resembles a fox more than a Pom, and wonder what the hell we’ve let ourselves in for…

When I started writing Transforming Pandora in the autumn of 2010, I had no idea it would turn into a series of three books. I wish I’d known, because then the information would have been included in the title. As it is, we’re trying to do it retrospectively, so apologies to readers if it came as a surprise that Squaring Circleswas a sequel. Happily, the third and last book – Pandora’s Gift: Pandora Series Book Three– makeseverything crystal clear.

The theme for the first in the series, Transforming Pandora, was the phoenix, symbolising Pandora’s transformation into a more fully-realised human being. I love the cover image, which shows the firebird and her egg on the ‘nest’, appearing to emerge from a woman’s head.

After Transforming Pandorawas published, I wanted to crack on with something else. But Pandora kept appearing on the page, so I went with the flow and began the sequel, Squaring Circles, which starts four years later.

The cover represents Vitruvian Man, an image showing the proportions of the human body. Leonardo da Vinci produced similar illustrations, believing, like Vitruvius, that “Man is the model of the world”. Da Vinci and other mathematicians of the day spent many hours trying to construct a square with the same area as a given circle, using just a compass and ruler. That’s how the phrase ‘squaring the circle‘ came to mean: ‘attempting the impossible’.

I also think the book can be represented by an image of the Holy Grail, since that is what certain characters are seeking: some to use for healing, some to be healed, and others for more nefarious purposes.

Before I’d even thought about what I was going to write next, I noticed that a few reviewers were wondering whether Pandora and Jay’s relationship would recover or come to grief. That decided me to continue. Pandora’s Gift begins just a few months after Squaring Circles concludes, and contains the answer to that question. And much more…

At the planning stage of each book, I knew what was going to happen at the beginning and end but wasn’t sure exactly how the rest of the drama would play out. My strategy was to start a chapter and trust the characters to take over. For example, in Pandora’s Gift, something impossible occurs which even took me by surprise. And the delightful thing is, Pandora had already set it up in SquaringCircleswithout my even realising it!

The cover of Pandora’s Gift shows the third eye for intuition, and a woman in two minds. On the spine and back cover there is an image of a dove, representing a sacred gift. But there’s also an angel lurking within the pages, so I’m giving him a shoutout as well.

Pandora’s Gift is out on 11 December 2015 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon and other outlets.